Today I’ll discuss an analysis of 2 of Amazon’s concept videos depicting their future autonomous drone service, how they frame privacy issues, and how these videos can be viewed in conversation with privacy laws and regulation.

As a privacy researcher with a human computer interaction background, I’ve become increasingly interested in how processes of imagination about emerging technologies contribute to narratives about the privacy implications of those technologies. Toda I’m discussing some thoughts emerging from a project looking at Amazon’s drone delivery service. In 2013, Amazon – the online retailer – announced Prime Air, a drone-based package delivery service. When they made their announcement, the actual product was not ready for public launch – and it’s still not available as of today. But what’s interesting is that at the time the announcement was made, Amazon also released a video that showed what the world might look like with this service of automated drones. And they released a second similar video in 2015. We call these videos concept videos.